Enchanted Bones: A Sarah Booth Delaney Short Mystery

By Carolyn Haines

In Carolyn Haines's Enchanted Bones, PI Sarah Booth Delaney comes to the rescue in a short mystery set in Zinnia, Mississippi, that will delight fans and new readers alike.

A lost little girl is just about the last thing Private Investigator Sarah Booth Delaney expects to see while horseback riding one evening in the woods, and her concern deepens when she reads the note pinned to the girl's outfit: it says she is cursed, and has consequently been abandoned.

Filled with concern for the child, Sarah Booth gets to work tracing her origins. The quest takes her and her partner, Tinkie, to a small nomadic community on the Mississippi River, where the answers to their questions lie. Sarah Booth must tread carefully, however, for danger awaits her there as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250793300

Carolyn Haines

Carolyn Haines is the USA Today bestselling author of the Sarah Booth Delaney mystery series and a number of other books in mystery and crime, including the Pluto's Snitch paranormal-historical mystery series, and Trouble, the black cat detective romantic suspense books. She is the recipient of the Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Writing, the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence, and the Mississippi Writers Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. She is a former journalist, bartender, photographer, farmhand, and college professor and lives on a farm where she works with rescue cats, dogs, and horses.

Book preview

Fall in the Mississippi Delta is the perfect time of year for riding horses. The days are cool, the air is dry, and the pesky bloodsucking flies and mosquitoes have been vanquished by the cool nights. For horse and human, it is a heavenly time.

The trail I chose today, atop my powerful but kind Reveler, wound through the cotton fields that made Mississippi, at one time, one of the richest states in the fledgling Union. Those same cotton fields, and the slave labor used to work them, also made Mississippi one of the most reviled states. Like so much about my home and my life, the good is inextricably mixed with the bad.

Reveler is a surprisingly large mixture of thoroughbred and Connemara stock. At over sixteen hands, he’s a sturdy boy with a will and a sense of humor. Often I’m the butt of his jokes. Today, he had a little buck in him, but he settled down to the ride, and I loved posting to his big trot.

With my beautiful hound dog, Sweetie Pie, running beside me, we covered the cotton fields and jumped a small overturned wooden rowboat. The boat was abandoned on the side of a field at least two miles from water. It was just one of the many strange things I found on my rides.

The cotton fields spread out around me, a green the color of money. Soon the blooms would burst open with the bolls of white fiber, and the harvesters will crawl over the land, picking and baling. The plants were healthy and the bolls plentiful. It would be a good crop this year. On my acreage, Billy Watson, a childhood friend who leases the Dahlia House acreage to farm, and I decided to grow organic fibers, to give up the chemicals and fertilizers that were killing the rich Delta soil. It was a gamble, but farming is always a gamble.

As I left the boundaries of Dahlia House behind, Reveler and I traveled on the edges of fields that have been farmed since the alluvial soil was cleared in the late 1700s. This is soil that works with the rhythm of farming, of planting the seeds in the spring and sowing the harvest in the fall. This clock of the seasons is now part of my blood.

The ride I chose was a long one that would take me to a large stream. Mission Creek is almost the size of a river, but swifter than most muddy Delta waterways. My mother and father often brought me to fish and play there. We never caught anything because we never really tried. We were there to splash and talk and share the summer day. In memory, this creek held only happiness.

By the time we made it to the growth of trees and shrubs that defined the creek, I was hot and tired, and even Reveler was ready to graze for a while. There was a perfect place, with the last of the summer pasture for him, and a fallen tree for me to lean against so I could savor the solitude of the running water and the sounds of birds and small creatures.

As much as I loved Coleman Peters, the sheriff of Sunflower County, I hadn’t invited him on this ride. I wanted the time alone. I wanted to allow myself to meld with the wildness, the untamed, the free elements of this special place. My heart was settling into a life routine with Coleman, but the parts of me that were once free and wild needed a bit of nurture. Riding my horse, walking in the woods, I could be completely me, without need to be part of anything more.

When I found the grassy plot, I took Reveler’s bridle off and set him to graze. Sweetie Pie plunked in the amber creek, even though it was too cold for me to take a dip. I loved swimming, but not today. I found my fallen tree and leaned against it to sit a spell and think, daydream, or just remember.

This place of peace stilled my normal worries and concerns, and my eyelids fluttered closed. Just a little nap as I found the magic between what is and what was. I could almost hear my mother’s laugh, or the way my father teased her in his deep baritone. Their voices were carried on the music of the creek as it ran over fallen trees and other woodland debris. This was the solace I sought.

In the distance a cry floated along the noise of the creek. A bird? Not any I recognized. Ignoring it, I thought back to a summer day when we brought a watermelon to the creek. Daddy sank it in the cold water to chill while we played and splashed. My parents had discussed building a pool, but my mother declined. This creek was her world, the natural